Interviews

The Artistry of Call of Duty 4

GameSpy: But it sounds like you nailed the feel and tone of the game early on.

Joel Emslie: Visually the game hit the mark we were looking for about halfway through. The first real visual benchmark for us was that level with the nighttime rescue of the tank. That became the demo level for the PC. That was the first level to actually hit the visual mark that set the rest of the tone for the game. So once we had that up and running we all kinda looked at it and said, "Here's the tone we want to keep going with."

GameSpy: In the game you've got soldiers fighting a ground war in the Middle East. Was there a temptation to get really political with the game?

Richard Kriegler: Not really. We really wanted to have a real story this time, and to have a real story you don't want to just go with news clippings of the current-day events. We wanted to fight a real army and have a real story. So we brought in a Hollywood writer [Jesse Stern] and we had him write up a story, and we worked with him for pretty much the whole length of the game.

Ghost-like ruins of playgrounds and churches litter the countryside around Chernobyl.

GameSpy: Several game sequences take place in the ruined cities near the Chernobyl disaster site. Artistically, these levels were really haunting. And they seemed very real. How did you go about creating those?

Richard Kriegler: For all of our levels, we do extensive research. We spend a lot of time. We send teams out to locations -- like Cairo -- just to shoot pictures. We get a lot of shots, a lot of film, and then we bring it all back and we research on the Internet for thousands of pictures. We really go after a place if we're going to do it. We get the whole tone and feeling of a place, even if we don't copy it building for building (which we don't want to do)... Chernobyl is particularly haunting and we had some great references.

Joel Emslie: A lot of the Chernobyl environment pays homage to how good our sound department is. If you go through and really listen, some of those areas you go into and you hear a haunting echo of children. Especially in these areas that were set up as community areas in Chernobyl. Little touches like that add to the really eerie feeling you get in that environment. It goes hand in hand with the visuals.

GameSpy: Okay, I totally have to replay that level now and listen for that.